#i know I've said spiders celia twice but I'm kind of like a person who makes red string boards for the aesthetics

[bigmilkagenda]

Of the many, many plates of pancakes* that were offered to the listener in magp 1-07, this one may be my favourite

[ID: A screenshot of an unofficial transcript to The Magnus Protocol. CELIA is saying "Yeah. I mean, it's an old system, but it could have been worse. It's not like we're wrestling with tape recorders and manila folders." /end ID]

When we meet TMA-Celia for the second time, she's lost her name. She was Lynne Hammond, and now she's not. She doesn't seem to remember Martin, either, but it's not clear how much of herself and her life from before the change she does remember. She's freaked out by the tape recorders that start showing up, and there's no indication that she associates them with the Institute specifically.

If Celia Ripley is, as we are clearly intended to believe or consider, the same Celia as in TMA, why is she making knowing comments about manila folders and tape recorders? Tape recorders in particular are hardly standard equipment at what seems to be mostly a text data-entry and cataloguing job. She could have said typewriters, or carbon paper. Fax machines, if we're dunking on Freddy specifically.

She says "tape recorders and manila folders." Celia Ripley is referencing The Magnus Institute, particularly the outdated technologies in use in the Archives.

Maybe she learned more from Melanie about what the recorders were and did at the Institute, sometime after MAG 190. Maybe she has those specific memories of giving her statement in MAG 100, and little else. Maybe Martin grew an apocalypse beard and she remembers everything, but just didn't recognise him out of context and in a tunnel and during A Pretty Weird Time Overall.

Maybe she stuck around with Melanie-Georgie-Basira for a while after things returned, and that's how she learned about the particular significance of tape recorders.

Maybe she found some tapes and listened to a couple hundred of them.

Or maybe she's simply an AU Celia, with a knack for oddly specific and kind of clunky comparisons, drawn into this through the powers of metafiction and string theory.

Or maybe someone filled her with spiders and sent her to finish the job of spreading Fear to this particular world.

And the reason this particular plate of textual pancakes** (short stack, butter and nightmare syrup) is one of my favourites from "Give and Take" is because I genuinely have no idea! None of these are theories because there isn't enough evidence to point me in any particular direction. It's a mystery!, Jon voice, etcetera.

If you cornered me and paid me to have an opinion about it I could say which options I thought were more likely, I guess. But the odds are high that I'd be wrong, and I think the boat for me getting paid to interpret texts probably sailed fifteen years ago, besides. I'm in this for the love of the game.***

November is the true spooky season in the northern hemisphere.**** Yeah, October ends with Halloween, but you know what month starts with Halloween? Mmhmm. By November of 2019 TMA had been on my list for a few years, and someone I was getting to know and really liked recommended it to me specifically in the days after 159 aired. The conditions were correct for me to get into something new, is what I'm saying. I still remember listening to "Anglerfish" for the first time, walking home from my office job in the blustery November dark. I got home starry-eyed and red-cheeked and thrilled by the story I'd just heard.

It took a couple of months for me to catch up, and though I loved having so much to listen to there were times when I wished I'd started earlier, to have the experience of seeing things unfold.

And now we're back at a beginning, and get to experience the horrible joys of finding out.

[ID: A screenshot of an unofficial transcript to The Magnus Protocol. LENA is saying "Of a sort. I hope you're as ready for it as you think you are. Consider yourself "in." /end ID]

*Sabrina pancake meme

** the best kind, especially if it's a contest between textual and fluffy pancakes. Keep those spongy bastards away from me, I'll take the kind with a typeface instead

***Being a huge nerd

**** For more of my opinions on November, see https://www.tumblr.com/almostmolly/188799234276